Two Oakland children’s centers to close; five remain open

Students play at the Golden Gate childhood development center on Friday. The center is expected to close its doors on Tuesday afternoon.

After weeks of threatening the closure of seven Oakland childhood development centers, the Oakland Unified School District announced Friday that five of the seven centers will remain open until at least the end of December.

The decision to maintain operations at the five centers came after district staff identified $2.1 million in unspent, unrestricted funds from last year’s budget.

“After June 30, we begin closing the books for the fiscal year,” said Troy Flint, OUSD director of public relations. “This usually takes several months to complete, but we expedited the process in order to find money to support early childhood education.”

Childhood development centers provide free early education and afterschool care to Oakland preschoolers and students in grades K-3. These centers came under fire in May, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed massive budget cuts to early childhood education across the state. To date, the school district’s total funding has been cut by $110 million this year.

Find out which campuses will remain open, and which will close, in Whitney Pennington’s article at Oakland North.